Someone in the CIA thought Edward Vaniel was responsible for
the Wayne murders.

I stood there staring at two words and a question mark scrawled in the
margin of a newspaper clipping. I had seen that headline and that
grainy photo so many times. Only one thing was different this time.
That scrawl of red ink.

Possible connection?

I peered at the handwriting, sifting through all I knew and all I could
deduce about the man who had written it. This was a CIA investigator,
one with enough experience and standing in the agency to be assigned to the
task force building a case against the most powerful crime boss in the city.
And experienced law enforcement operatives are used to scum like Vaniel.

That was my first assumption.
But as we began sorting through paper files copied at the agency, and as
Oracle refined her search using the names, dates and places those hardcopies
provided, a very different picture began to emerge.

There’s a kind of rat-cunning that passes for smarts in the gutters.
Every wiseguy-turned-snitch comes up with a variation on the same dumb idea,
but for some reason he thinks it’s a brainstorm and he imagines he’s the
only one to ever dream up such a brilliant plan. It’s hard to imagine
why they think they’re clever. Their “strategy” is laughably
transparent: they’ll demand blanket immunity for anything they say in court,
and once they’re sworn in, they’ll confess to everything they’ve ever done,
making them untouchable for the rest of their lives. It doesn’t work.
Rat-cunning only impresses other rats. DAs, federal investigators and
state attorney generals consider it a minor annoyance.

Vaniel was like all human refuse, he
thought he had a brilliant plan. At some point in the earliest
meetings, he began insisting the immunity package absolve him of anything
in his past. He said there were things he’d done that weren’t pretty
that had nothing to do with Falcone and the mob, and he didn’t want any of
it coming out in any trial they had planned. The agents were floored.
The sheer gall of it was almost impressive. Vaniel wasn’t
trying to trick them into immunity beyond the scope of his testimony, he was
demanding it outright. He refused to give specifics, he volunteered no
information about his past other than some of it “may have been
high-profile” and that it happened in Gotham.

One of the agents looked into it while the others went through the
motions, continuing to meet with Vaniel and his son about his eventual
testimony against Falcone.

Oracle soon identified the agent delving into Vaniel’s past. It
turned out to be Nick McDonough. I remembered his bio and wasn’t
impressed. This was a man for whom Gotham was nothing more than a pit
stop. He got himself assigned to the task force because nailing
Carmine Falcone would help his career. A promotion and reassignment to
Washington would make his eventual move into private security a far more
lucrative endeavor.

McDonough apparently found the same kind of information we had from
Carmine Falcone, witnesses who’d heard Vaniel bragging, etc. The
ambitious moron thought he could guarantee Vaniel’s cooperation against
Falcone by blackmailing him about the Wayne murders.

If only Edward Vaniel wasn’t such a
hateful creep. I’d seen how he behaved with his son. I’d seen
the disgusted contempt with which his former cronies spoke of him. I
could easily guess how a man like that would behave with federal agents,
especially if he thought he held all the cards. I could easily guess
how McDonough and the others must have hated him. And so, even if they
didn’t have enough, shall we say, evidence to hold over him,
McDonough tried putting the screws to him anyway. They would make
the smug bastard tow the line.

They confronted Eddie without his son present, and he went silent.
He alluded to the immunity package, “if it were true, it wouldn’t matter
because…”

They told him this was too big to be covered by any immunity deal.

He gave them nothing, walked out, and was never heard from again.

McDonough was transferred to Pittsburgh, not Washington; no promotion,
and when he left the agency a year later, he could do no better than chief
of security for an aluminum manufacturer—which subsequently went out of
business.

“It sounds like it wasn’t exactly his ‘unreliability as a witness’ that
killed things,” Selina observed when Bruce finished piecing it together.

He looked up sharply, a flash of venomous anger in his eyes and an acid
retort on his lips. But it flickered out a moment later, and he
returned his attention to a debriefing memo attached to Special Agent
McDonough’s resignation. They’d returned to the cave and were gathered
around the conference table again, the new files appropriated from the CIA
arranged in neat, orderly stacks.

“Yeah, it’s not exactly accurate,” Dick agreed with Selina. “But
it’s a concise and diplomatic phrase in a report your boss is going to read.
Better than saying ‘Nick bluffed with a pair of threes and we lost the
family farm.’”

Feeling a disapproving bat-glare, Dick
glanced up guiltily—and saw the glare was far more hostile than he expected.
Bruce’s frustration had increased exponentially since they’d returned to the
cave… And it was easy to see why. First Falcone’s bluster that
everybody confessed to the Wayne shooting back when the case was
news, then that “unreliability of the witness” notation in the CIA file.
It was looking more and more like they could write Vaniel off as a pathetic,
lying or delusional kook. But when they found that newspaper—“Possible
connection” to the Wayne murders—it seemed to change everything. But
now… now it turned out the “Possible connection” was nothing more than what
Bruce and Dick had already learned… It was beyond “frustrating.” Every
answer was just a doorway to more questions.

“Of course, most cops are scrupulously
honest about these things,” Dick said quickly. “And I certainly
learned early that no fibbing of any kind is ever acceptable in a log or
report, and to do so undermines the very tenets of trust and teamwork.”

Since Bruce’s eyes had now returned to
the file, Dick turned to Selina, pointed, and mouthed “it was you,
your fault, museum, you know the time, worst Zogger-beating of my life
after that. And I got grounded for a month.”

She stuck out her tongue, and then picked up a different file.

“Okay, so CIA is into CYA,” she murmured. “A little misdirection, a
little creative reframing of the facts. ‘We botched it with a witness
who might have been useless anyway; we never really got to find out.’
As intriguing as this whole minidrama has been and as deep as it goes, it
really doesn’t tell us a thing about the…” she glanced at Bruce. “The
case we care about.”

Bruce looked at her and tossed his file back onto the table with a
violent snap of the wrist. David Vaniel’s name appeared prominently at
the top of the page. Not for the first time, Selina wondered about his
focus on the son’s involvement.

“Maybe we’re looking at this
backwards,” Dick said suddenly. “We’re trying to find evidence that he
did it. Maybe we should go the other way. Reasonable doubt, just
like in court. Assume it’s not him. What reason would he
have for lying about something like this? Why would someone want to
claim responsibility for a crime on their deathbed if it wasn’t true?”

“There are too many reasons to list,” Selina said impatiently, her temper
fraying almost as much as Bruce’s. “Maybe he’s a victim of his own Big
Lie: he’s bragged about it so much over the years that he’s come to believe
it himself. More likely? Bruce is a face and a name. This
guy is less than nobody, he’s got a couple hundred victims over a quarter of
a century that are all nobodies too. He wants to confess on his
deathbed, unburden his soul or whatever, who’s he gonna call? The
Nameless Victim Hotline?”

“A surrogate,” Bruce growled.

It fit with the gross selfishness of the confession. There was no
virtue in the act, no remorse and no concern for what he’d done, either in
butchering my family or calling me to his bedside to confess. There
was nothing but pride and willful concern for his soul. Did that make
more sense, or less? If Bruce Wayne was nothing more than a proxy, a
stand-in for all those Edward Vaniel had hurt?

Selina continued her laundry list of
reasons Vaniel might have lied, but I started listing my own as I thought
back to that hospital room, the particulars neither of them knew of that…
confession.

Maybe it was one last jab at the world he’d envied and despised his whole
life, to get back at those “Ivory Tower sacks of shit” once and for all.
Or maybe he was looking for a way out; his own body was failing him, he was
no longer that tough street soldier he’d always envisioned himself to be.
A thug like “Easy Eddie” wasn’t supposed to die rotting away in a hospital
bed like thousands of other rubes in this city; he should go out in a blaze
of glory. So he could have devised the ultimate con: he convinces
Wayne that he’s the killer, Wayne kills him in anger (ending his slow,
painful descent into death), and the whole of Gotham City is turned on its
ear when its prince, one of those hoity-toity bluebloods, is nothing more
than a… a mindless, soulless killer.

And given my violent reaction…

It was pointless. All of it was pointless. There were
countless reasons why Vaniel might lie. He was a sick, evil toadstool;
since when does that sort need a reason? Dick was wasting our time and
so was Selina. I was wrong to get them involved, they didn’t begin to
understand…

I looked at the files on the table: the folder with the newspaper
clipping was closed, but I knew it was in there and it was just the same as
if I could see that wrinkled, yellowing headline.

Why Vaniel would lie on his deathbed was a pointless question.

The real question was: of all the
things Vaniel could confess to, why this?

Alfred had come and gone with coffee. Dick was still reading the
CIA transcripts, digging for more information on where the negotiations had
broken down. Bruce picked up Vaniel’s affidavit again and began
searching through it intently. Selina was staring into space.

“Pearls,” she said softly. “You said he had a real chip about
wealth and status. I was just thinking… pearls have a definite ‘old
money’ aura…”

Bruce’s head popped up from the folder and he stared at her. “Could
I speak to you in private,” he said evenly.

“Sure.”

He walked her back to the trophy room, the file still in his hand, and
for a moment, Selina thought “speaking in private” might be an excuse for
him to visit the safe again. Instead, he turned to her and spoke in a
harsh whisper.

“More and more arrows are pointing to Vaniel being the one, but there is
too much at stake not to be sure.”

“Seems reasonable,” Selina said carefully.

He grunted and walked away. Selina remained where she stood,
shocked for a moment, and then followed him back to the table.

“I keep coming back to the motive,” Dick was saying, shaking his head.
“The original confession. Why would Vaniel be making this up on his
deathbed? He’s not asking for money, he’s got no reason for revenge or
spite. What’s the upside? What would he gain?”

Bruce said nothing, he just looked at Dick for a long moment then dropped
the affidavit on the table and sat.

“Actually, there’s a different motive to consider.” He glanced at Selina
returning to the table then back to Dick. “What did you think just now
when I got up to speak to Selina in private?”

“Uh,” Dick began hesitantly, “I… figured you wanted to tell her something
you didn’t want me to hear.”

“Like a few minutes ago, when you told her how you got in trouble once
for falsifying a log entry after Catwoman jumped you at the museum.
You did it silently when you thought I wasn’t looking, because you assumed I
wouldn’t appreciate the levity at a time like this.”

“Bruce, I—”

“Can you think of another reason?”

Dick’s mouth dropped open slightly, he glanced at Selina and then rubbed
his chin thoughtfully.

“Maybe if you wanted to ask her something private? If it was a
personal question that might embarrass her or you. Or if another
person in the room might keep her from answering candidly.”

Bruce nodded, thoughtfully, thinking back to the night before when he’d
done just that, sending Nightwing to drive back from Falcone’s alone so he
could question Catwoman privately in the Batmobile.

“Can you think of another
reason?” he asked again.

Dick shook his head but Bruce kept pressing. Dick suggested every
possibility he could think of. Each time Bruce would consider it for a
moment, grunt, then reclassify it as a variation on one of the original two:
either Bruce didn’t want Dick to hear what was said, or Bruce thought Selina
wouldn’t want him to hear.

“I don’t know,” he spat, “You’re the one that did it, why don’t you tell
me?”

Dick expected a retort as harsh as his outburst, or at least a disgusted
glare, but Bruce simply turned his attention to Selina.

“Why did you think I did it?”
he asked in Batman’s sharpest interrogation tones.

Her eyes widened, and she took a low, startled breath at the implications
of the question—and what he must know her answer might be.

“You do have an answer that
Dick hasn’t thought of,” he demanded.

It was so wrong. It was like… if he’d pinched her ass instead of
threatening to arrest her in the Sotheby’s vault. Or made a needless
allusion to secret identities in front of Randolph Larraby at the Country
Club.

Selina said nothing at first, merely
staring into that ferocious rooftop batglare. He couldn’t want
her to mention the safe in front of Dick… Then, slowly, she regained her
feline composure, and she raised a knowing eyebrow.

“I have an answer,” she said in Catwoman’s cool, easy confidence.
“Dick, would you give us a minute?”

“Never mind,” Bruce said instantly before Dick could react. “You
have an answer but you won’t say it in front of Dick.” He turned away from
her and back to the table, motioning for her to take her seat. “Your
reason is wrong, by the way, as were yours, Dick. I asked to talk to
Selina in private to gauge the reaction and to see the dynamic from that
perspective.”

“What do you mean?” Dick asked, following Bruce’s eyes back to the table
and the Vaniel name on top of a witness deposition.

“Back at the hospital,” Bruce reminded
them ominously. “Vaniel sent his son out of the room.
Why?”

“Wh- Why does it matter?” Dick sputtered.

“The whys are everything in this
case,” Bruce declared. “There’s no physical evidence, no one has any
credibility, everyone has an ulterior motive. ‘Why’ is the only
way to separate what makes sense from what doesn’t. Edward Vaniel sent
David out of the room before he would talk to me. Why?”

“Because it’s his son,” Dick
pointed out, like it was obvious.

Bruce shook his head.

“Not enough. Vaniel wouldn’t give a damn what David thought of him,
he made that abundantly clear. It wasn’t about sparing his son’s
feelings.”

“Well, it certainly wasn’t about him sparing yours,” Selina countered.

Bruce nodded.

“So if it wasn’t for David’s sake and it wasn’t for mine, it was for his
own. He wanted David out of that room…” he trailed off, his fingertips
tapping the top of the deposition. Suddenly, his fingers stopped.

“It wasn’t because David is his son,
but because his son is a lawyer,” he concluded, his eyes popping up
from the file and jumping back and forth between Selina and Dick.
“David Vaniel knows there’s no statute of limitations on murder. And
all of his efforts, everything we’ve seen in these files about the agency
negotiations, seem focused on reducing the penalties for his father’s
crimes, not avoiding them altogether. This wasn’t just any lawyer, he
was an ADA and he has strong personal convictions about right and wrong.
That was enough for a rat like Vaniel to be cautious. If he confessed
to two murders in front of his ‘feeble, doughy-headed son,’ then dying or
not, he could be put on trial for murder. And he’d perceive his son as
just enough of a ‘goody-goody’ to turn him in.”

“Oh, this is fucked,” Selina murmured, stunned. “These people are
just… fucked.”

“Not the way I would have phrased it, but yeah,” Dick agreed. “So,
what does this get us? I mean, what does it mean for the case?”

“That David doesn’t know anything about it,” Bruce growled, his fingers
closing into a fist. As usual, the more they discovered, the less they
knew.

“Which means that the only one who does… is Edward,” Dick concluded
softly, glancing apprehensively at Bruce. “I think it may be time to
pay him another visit.”

“No,” Bruce said instantly.

“There’s too much we don’t know,” Dick insisted. “And if all this
running around has shown us anything it’s that the only person who does know
is Edward Vaniel. C’mon Bruce, you know scum like that, he’s no match
for Batman and Nightwing. We push him on a couple of these
inconsistencies, we’ll make him crack.”

“No,” Bruce repeated.

“I don’t mean literally go in costume,” Dick pressed. “I mean—”

“I know what you meant and I said no.”

Batman had spoken. With the calm, quiet authority of the man who
makes the final decision he said no. They would not return to the
hospital, they would not question Edward Vaniel again.

There was a long, tense silence. Batman had spoken. And
Batman was wrong.

“What other option do we have?” Dick asked.

No answer.

“Bruce…you know that I’m right.”

No answer.

“Bruce, you’re the one who taught
me this. You’re the one who showed me a police report and said you
have to start with the facts, start with what you know, start with the
information. We do not have enough inform—”

“I don’t know what will happen if I go back in that room,” Bruce said
evenly.

It was said with quiet resolve and calm acceptance—belied by a burning
Hell Month ferocity in his eyes.

The Bentley turned onto the 10th
Avenue Bridge and then slowed to the crawl of late-morning traffic inching
towards the city. I tuned out the hum of the car, the warmth of
Selina’s leg pressed against mine, and a rhythmic metallic thk.
Dick sitting beside her, fidgeting with the window controls.

“You won’t be alone this time,” she’d said in the cave. I’d almost
forgotten she was there. But before I could turn to face her, let
alone process her words, Dick was nodding along. “Damn right.”

Somehow it was decided. Somehow the two of them—that kid from the
circus and the cat burglar with the naughty grin—had willed the decision it
into being: We were going back to the hospital, all three of us. Dick
would talk to David, see if the boy knew anything at all, and Selina… Selina
would be with me. I knew Vaniel wouldn’t want to talk with another
person in the room, any other person, but Selina does know how to push a
man’s buttons. She’d honed in on Vaniel’s class envy and dressed to
provoke it: Chanel sweater, Hermes scarf, diamond earrings, pink sapphire.
It was smart. His hate would override his caution. A man like
that, driven by hate his whole life, it would take over. Blot out
everything else until—

“Bruce? Bruce, we’re almost there.”

Selina. Whispering. And… sliding her finger into my palm?
I realized I was making a fist and she was trying to ease it open. I
pulled my hand away… At least she was discreet. Neither Dick nor
Alfred had noticed.

None of them understood, this wasn’t
just about what happened in that alley all those years ago. It
was about what happened in the hospital only forty hours before. It
wasn’t just my father’s blood spattered on my shirtsleeve while Officer Cure
typed up a witness statement, it was that bloody foam on Edward Vaniel’s
bedsheets after I’d pressed my thumb into his trachea with no conscious
thought but to squeeze.

“You wanted to but you didn’t need to,” Selina had said. Like it
was “I don’t look at it as stealing as much as ‘observing practical
socialism.’”

“You wanted to but you didn’t need to.”

Like that subtle semantic distinction would matter to Edward Vaniel when
compression of the carotid arteries on both sides of his neck cut off the
blood flow to his brain, when the less efficient—but more satisfying because
it required more force—method of compressing his windpipe stopped the flow
of air into his already rotting lungs. When…

“You wanted to but you didn’t need to.”

I’d known rage before. But there
was always something—an instinct, a voice, a… something that would
watch, that would know… a something that would not permit it to go too
far. But with Vaniel… Just keep choking.

“You wanted to but you didn’t need
to,” Selina said. How would she know? How the hell would she
know? “I don’t look at it as stealing as much as observing practical
socialism.” Does she know how angry I was that night? Does she
begin to grasp what real rage is? The passion that burns
in true hatred, the control you need to keep it in check?

Just keep choking.

Was there any other thought at all in my mind at that moment?

… or did I just not hear?

The elevator doors opened onto the Oncology Wing at Gotham Memorial
Hospital, and Bruce was assaulted by a barrage of sense memories from his
earlier visit. The antiseptic odor that filled the hallway, the trio
of signs at the reception desk forbidding smoking, cell phones, and
detailing visiting hours. The same nurse sat at the desk—but this time
it wasn’t necessary to ask her to find David Vaniel. He was standing
right there.

It seemed unlikely and, for a moment, Bruce questioned his perception.
But sure enough, David Vaniel was walking up to them, looking utterly
shocked.

“Mr. Wayne! I… didn’t expect, I mean, after the way you left…
I assumed, that is, I never imagined that you would be back…”

Bruce felt himself detach from the situation. He made the
introductions on autopilot—Selina Kyle. My son Dick—while the
Detective part of his mind latched onto details, not for any purpose, just
as an unconscious instinct. David’s eyes were bloodshot, the flesh
beneath them dark and puffy, his voice a bit hoarse. Lack of sleep
would account for the dark circles and the voice. The rest looked like
crying.

To his surprise, the next thought that
slammed into Bruce’s mind was filled with acidic disgust: What the hell
did Edward do him now? That wasn’t the Detective, he realized; it
was another corner of his brain entirely. An angry one.

Once the introductions were complete, Bruce looked at him evenly.
“I had some more questions for your father,” he began, then trailed off.

He’d concealed his feelings in a
polite businesslike manner, so he couldn’t quite understand what was
happening. David’s eyes had shifted to the expression felons have when
Batman surprises them—a discreet ping at the nurse’s station was the only
sound for several tense seconds while the blood drained from David Vaniel’s
face—What’s happening here? that angry corner of his mind asked
furiously.

“Oh,” David said after another uncomfortable beat. “Um, I’m sorry.
He, uh… he’s gone. He… he took a turn for the worst last night, fell
into a coma. He died about uh… um, it was uh, about two hours ago.”

He swallowed.

Bruce barely registered the light gasp that came from Dick and only
subconsciously noted Dick and Selina’s heads turning in his direction.
His mind reeled.

“What?” he heard his voice asking.

Vaniel jolted slightly at the strange timbre of Bruce’s voice and started
to babble. After the way Bruce had left the last time he’d just
assumed… he didn’t even think to contact Bruce when Edward deteriorated…

That wild, red fury surged through Bruce’s muscles again, into his hands,
his fingers, his nerve endings, contorting into the tightest fist, ready to
slam this—this—animalcriminalthing into the wall and squeeze the answers out
of it.

He fought to keep himself from shaking, fought to keep the rage from
boiling over as he looked into David’s eyes—

Red—The boy’s eyes were red. Bloodshot. The flesh beneath
them dark and slightly puffy. His voice a bit hoarse.

Before they arrived, David Vaniel had been crying.

Because his father was dead.

Dick and Selina watched Bruce, not
knowing what this new information would mean—for him or the situation, but
sensing the shift in intensity that went beyond Batman or Psychobat into a
new dimension of Bruce Unknown. They traded a quick glance,
both silently questioning if one of them might need to step in and deflect,
diffuse, or… something.

But suddenly, the tension disintegrated—it didn’t fade or evaporate, it
simply didn’t exist any more. A strange calm seemed to settle; both
Selina and Dick returned their attention to Bruce and saw his face slowly
soften.

David was still talking, babbling
really. “…tors did everything they could, but it was too late. I
mean, he had been declining for months—we all knew it was coming—but at the
very end, it was so fast… it all happened so…”

Bruce reached out and touched David’s shoulder, which abruptly ended his
ramble mid-sentence.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce said sincerely.

David stared at him questioningly for a moment. His eyes watered
slightly and he stammered out a light but sincere “Th-thank you.”

A quick sniffle and David blinked away the moisture in his eyes. He
was suddenly hit with a rush of apologetic embarrassment. “Oh god, you
came all the way down here and he’s gone, so you didn’t have the chance to—”

“That’s not the most pressing issue at this moment,” Bruce said, as he
would defer a topic at a board meeting.

David wanted to apologize again, but something in the look of finality on
Bruce’s face stopped him. He took a deep breath and a wave of
exhaustion crashed down on his shoulders.

For the first time since they arrived, Bruce glanced at Dick and Selina.
He didn’t seem to even register the confusion and shock on their faces, he
merely nodded toward a small waiting area down the hall.

David looked meekly at Bruce, Dick and Selina as the three of them
ushered him toward the water cooler in the corner. After shakily
drinking a proffered cup of water, David finished his confused ramble, about
Superman of all things.

“…I know it sounds weird, but it’s four in the morning, and you’re in
this little room with nothing but the sound of the heart monitor, man’s in a
coma, TV is on without sound. One of those 24-hour news channels and I
was just watching the crawl go by. And I notice it’s a twenty minute
loop. Every twenty minutes, they start this same footage with
Superman. And every twenty minutes the night nurse looked in to see
how I was doing. I started to think how funny that was, like maybe she
had the same station on out at the desk and when Superman shows up, that’s
her cue to get up and walk the halls…”

Bruce could see they were the first “People” David had talked to, apart
from hospital staff, since his father’s death, and probably for hours or
even days before. He was still finding his balance again.
Finally, when David seemed himself again, Bruce asked the question.

“Your father never told you anything about our meeting, did he?”

“No, he refused to talk about it,” David sighed. “I tried to get
him to tell me, but… well, that’s just how he is—was. I’m sorry.
I might know something, if you wanted to tell me what it was about…”

“No,” Bruce responded after a moment. “He obviously wanted it kept
between us, and I think we should respect that. It doesn’t matter
now.” His face darkened slightly before he added, “Some things are better
left alone.”

“I’m used to it,” David said candidly with a light, breathy chuckle.
“Probably better that way. My dad was always good at leaving a lot of
unanswered questions in his wake. It’s fitting that’s all I have left
to remember him by. Questions and bad memories and a healthy dose of
debt. I guess this is the last time I have to worry about that… god,
the bills. Funeral, hospital…”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll take care of it,” Bruce said,
automatically, like shooing a fly.

He only realized the import when he perceived the triple waves of shock
emanating from David, from Dick, and from Selina.

“Oh no, no please,” David blanched. “That’s not necessary, I— I
wasn’t looking for a handout. I was just complaining out loud.
Mr. Wayne, you don’t need to do that.”

A priest who had never met Edward
Vaniel recited the same eulogy he gave at all such funerals, inserting the
name of the bereaved (“his son David”) in the appropriate passages, along
with that of Edward’s late wife Karen, his mother Joan, and similar details
gleaned from a death certificate and a ten minute conversation with David
the day before. The cemetery caretakers knew the speech well, and the
winch operator began lowering the casket on cue, so it touched bottom just
as the priest opened his bible to read the 23rd Psalm. The
bible was only a prop, the psalm recited from memory. The two mourners
said their good-byes. The caretakers paused only a few seconds,
sensing this was not one of those occasions where long, somber delays were
expected. They began shoveling dirt onto the casket at once…

Bruce stayed for a moment and watched.

It felt different. It felt… Even
after the Chill case, he never felt this. Bruce would never be at
peace with his parents’ murder. He would always want to
know the truth. But for the first time in his life, he felt… he felt
that he didn’t need to know. If this fresh grave and all the
unanswered questions that led here was all there would ever be, life still
had meaning. The smell of grass in the air was still sweet and the sun
still felt warm on his skin.

He left the caretakers to their work and walked to the Bentley where Dick
and Alfred were waiting. Both, predictably, asked if he was okay.

Bruce glanced across the gravestones to a point further down the drive
where David Vaniel was getting into his car.

“I’m fine,” he said simply.

Alfred accepted the statement and opened the car door. Dick
hesitated.

“I don’t understand, Bruce. I
don’t understand why you’re here today. I really don’t
understand why you paid for it. The hospital bills, the coffin, the
tombstone. Why? What happened at the hospital, Bruce, why would you
possibly—”

“Because I could.” He pointed to the car. “Let’s go home.”

Bruce said little on the drive home, his mind replaying the whole twisted
tale that had brought him here. The rage, the pain, even that vacant
nothingness he’d felt that night after the first meeting with Vaniel at the
hospital—it all seemed so far away now. Distant. Foreign, even.
All the things that seemed so important at the time appeared pointless, even
trivial now. He found himself seeing different details, subtle
flickers that he’d been too wrapped up in his own mind to really see as they
were happening. To his surprise, his hindsight seemed to focus on the
others. Alfred. Dick. Selina.

They’d refused to leave. They’d
never left his side for a minute, working with him every step of the way
instead of leaving him alone to do it himself. It had been so
frustrating, so maddening. All he’d wanted was to handle this
on his own, but they wouldn’t let him.

Thank God.

The only time his memories let them fade into the background, the only
time he locked again on his own pain was when he remembered that second trip
to the hospital, the intensity of that moment still burned in his psyche.
The pain and frustration he’d been holding inside had reached a fever pitch
and when David told them his father was dead…

It was all gone—he’d come so close to finding the truth, to finally
getting the answers and it all came crashing down with two little words:
“He’s gone.”

How was it possible? He couldn’t
just DIE? He couldn’t get off that easy! He couldn’t just
escape forever out of reach with all the answers. HE COULDN’T!

Rage, Pain, and Batman all screamed that Bruce could still get the
answers: his whole life becoming Batman, all the training, all the
sacrifice, all the grueling hours honing his mind and his body, deduction,
hypothesis theory, karate, judo, jujitsu—it had to be good for something!
He knew how to get the truth from someone and if that someone was gone, then
he could always get it from the next best source—This pawn in front of him
saying there were no answers, the answers died two hours ago. He would
sear the truth out of the monster’s soul with the sheer force of his hate—he
would—

He would what?

He’d met David Vaniel’s eyes, the eyes of an innocent caught in the
crossfire between his father’s past and a stranger’s rage, and suddenly
everything was very clear.

David wasn’t an extension of Edward
Vaniel, he was an innocent. And Bruce did not prey on innocents.
It went against everything he believed, everything he was… He could
not thrust his rage onto the son any more than he could have taken the
life of the father. Those words of Selina’s that night in the
costume vault suddenly sounded very different to him. He wouldn’t have
killed Edward because he didn’t kill. It sounded so ludicrously simple
when she’d said it. Now it felt… exactly that simple.

As the car serpentined through the cemetery, Bruce looked back at the
caretakers methodically shoveling dirt into the grave and a strange calm
settled on him again. It wasn’t just Edward Vaniel’s body being buried
down there but Bruce’s hatred of him was as well.

Then he turned to Dick. He’d accepted the brief, somewhat
dismissive answer to his question, although he clearly didn’t understand it.
Bruce thought how often that must have happened over the years.

“To be honest, Dick, I’m not one
hundred percent sure myself why I decided to pay for the medical bills and
all the rest of it.” He paused for a second, as if trying to think of how to
continue. “For a moment, I wanted to punish David, for everything.
Not just because of his father, but for being there, in the wrong
place at the wrong time with the wrong DNA. But you said it yourself
back in the cave: He had no answers and… he wasn’t to blame. He was an
innocent man who had dealt with the worst of society all of his life.
There was no way I could strike out against that.”

They drove on, Dick wanting to accept the answer he’d been given but
clearly not understanding.

“So he was innocent, he didn’t know anything—which means he was just a
guy who happened to be involved. So why did you… that still doesn’t
explain why you’re here today or why you reacted the way you did at the
hospital, offering to pay and everything.”

Bruce smiled lightly. “At that moment, he wasn’t ‘just a guy,’
Dick. He was a man who’d lost his father. He was a son. In
pain.” Bruce laid a hand on Dick’s shoulder and looked him straight in the
eye. “And that’s something I know a little about.”

Dick stared back for a long moment, Bruce’s words causing a knot in his
throat, but soon a return smile crossed his lips.

“Is that why you offered to pay for all of it: the hospital bills, the
coffin, the gravesite?” Dick’s grin threatened to turn mischievous.
“Guilt?”

There was a faint grumble deep in Bruce’s chest that sounded like the
beginning of a disapproving grunt, but his smile stayed in place.

“Actually, that’s too easy an answer. Why did I really pay for all
of it? Because I could. David was in trouble, caught in dire
straits due to circumstances he couldn’t control. And that was
something Bruce Wayne could easily fix.”

Bruce expected a sarcastic remark about talking about himself in the
third person, but instead, Dick’s face grew serious.

“Bruce, I’m sorry,” he said meaningfully. “I wanted so much for
this to be it. I wanted to help you finally resolve this, once and for
all. I feel like we failed.”

Bruce shook his head.

“We didn’t fail. We just
didn’t find all the answers.”

“Semantics,” Dick grumbled.

“No. No, it’s not.”

Dick thought for a moment as the car turned onto the Wayne property, then
slowed to stop in front of the manor’s main entrance. Bruce got out,
knowing Alfred planned to drive Dick back to the city. But instead of
closing the door right away, Dick waited, clearly wanting to say more.

“And you’re okay with that? With not finding all of the answers?” he
asked solemnly.

Bruce looked out in the direction of the cemetery, thinking of Edward
Vaniel’s grave.

“I will be.”

At the funeral, standing over that
pitiful grave that no one would ever visit again, I had come to an
understanding. As I thought through all that happened in those two
weeks since the letter arrived from David Vaniel, “writing to you at the
behest of my father…” I realized that distinction between wanting
and needing was very real indeed: I had a choice. I could spend my
life suffering over the family I lost or enjoying the one I have now.

And I would honor my parents better by doing the latter.

Edward Vaniel was a miserable piece of
filth. That he was born human at all was probably some cosmic mistake.
He was a horrible husband, a brutal father and an all around worthless human
being. The world should have danced a jig on his grave, celebrating
the death of a monstrosity. And yet here was this boy, whom Vaniel
beat, abused, harassed and did unspeakable things to his entire life—the one
person left in the world who should be celebrating the most—and
instead he was upset that Edward was dead. Despite everything, Edward
was still his father. And when your father dies, you lose a
little piece of yourself…

I have a son. I would never want Dick to define his life by loss.
I would never want Dick to spend his life suffering. I would never
want Dick to choose hate and sorrow and emptiness.

Maybe someday I’ll find new evidence. Maybe one day more
information will surface that reveals what happened that night.

But if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter as much anymore. Being Batman
was never about solving my parents’ murder, it was about preventing such a
thing from ever happening again. I could spend the rest of my life,
devote all my resources to finding out what happened in that alley and still
maybe end up with nothing.

And if I did, whether I found the truth or not, what then? What
satisfaction could I have knowing more innocents had died because I was
obsessed with hunting down a single killer. That’s no way to honor my
parents.

The best thing I can do for them is what I have always done, to keep
preventing these tragedies from befalling others.

The way to honor their memory is to keep defending innocents. The
way to honor their memory is to keep being Batman.

The bat Walapang perched low over Workstation One, just as always.
Bruce still wore the suit he’d worn to the funeral, although he’d removed
his jacket and tie. He filled in the final notes on Edward Vaniel’s
confession and tested the link to his parents’ casefile and the
cross-reference to the Falcone/CIA connection. Finally, he attached
electronic copies of Edward Vaniel’s final medical records and death
certificate. He scrolled back up to the file header and stared for a
moment:

Casefile:

00000-001

Crime:

Double Homicide

Victims:

Wayne, Thomas

Wayne, Martha

Assailant:

UNKNOWN

Case Status: OPEN

He typed rapidly on the console keyboard, glanced back up at the file,
and gave a light, satisfied smile.